During the first intermission of the very first game, Don Cherry took the stage and bravely rose up in defence of the right to damage another man’s brain. He called former fighters turncoats and hypocrites for speaking out against what fighting did to them and others. He said hitting would vanish from the game. He showed a montage of Scott Stevens’s most violent hits, telling people to enjoy them because their like will vanish like the dinosaurs. Which must be a real blow to the business of selling violent hockey DVDs, one would imagine.

“Enjoy this, folks,” said Cherry, as Stevens unloaded again and again. “Because you’re never, ever going to see it again.” On the screen, Eric Lindros lay on his side in a heap.

And a few minutes later at the Air Canada Centre, with many of the platinum seats vacant and the air almost still, the puck lay in the slot in front of the Montreal Canadiens goal, where Carey Price was lying on his back amid a thicket of players from both teams. And Matthew Lombardi skated around the net, a blue patch on the white ice, almost in slow motion, and he just roofed it.

“I didn’t even know what to do after I scored,” said Lombardi. “A lot of emotions going through.” He deemed his exultations “the worst celebration of all time.”

It was Toronto’s first goal of the season, and the 90th goal of Lombardi’s career, but that was not why teammate Dion Phaneuf fished the puck out of the net for safekeeping. It was because Matt Lombardi had not played a real game in 358 days due to a concussion that wouldn’t go away.

Reacting to Cherry’s schtick would be a fool’s game if he didn’t speak to so many Canadians, to the kids out there playing the game. (And who, by the way, are no longer allowed to hit one another in the head.) But it should be noted that Max Pacioretty was out there too, for the first time since getting driven into a stanchion by Zdeno Chara on March 8. So was Chris Campoli, a week after Ryan Malone drove a shoulder through his head with no suspension attached, because Campoli allegedly made himself vulnerable too late. (Campoli left the game with a lower-body injury, and was seen leaving the arena on crutches.) Colton Orr was a healthy scratch after missing half a season with a concussion after a fight with George Parros of Anaheim on Jan. 20.

And on Versus, Mike Milbury was apparently singing from the Cherry songbook, defending the role of hits to the head in the game.

For the 29-year-old Lombardi, it had been so long. He remembers Chicago’s Dave Bolland driving him into the boards as they fought for the puck on Oct. 13, 2010; he remembers staggering back to the Nashville bench, his legs like rubber bands, and he remembers finishing the game. He didn’t think he had a concussion until he was in the shower, when his head started to hurt so much it felt like it was boiling over. He was angry that he would have to miss two or three games.

He didn’t play again all season. The symptoms were familiar, if you follow this kind of thing.

“Reading, it was so weird,” Lombardi said before Toronto’s season-opening 2-0 win over the Montreal Canadiens. “I would always have symptoms, but some things would make it worse. I had a lot of pressure, like my head was getting squeezed. And headaches, which is different. And reading, everything would get worse. TV, too. I would almost overheat, like when you’ve got the flu. And driving — your eyes are doing a lot of work, and I had neck stuff too, so when you turn you head your nerves are getting pinched, and I’d get all kinds of weird feelings.”

One test involved standing in the middle of the room, eyes closed, walking on the spot. You are supposed to stay there, but early on he wound up in the corner of the room. He would drop from 197 pounds down to 182, just via atrophy — “My friends would say, man, your head looks so big on your body,” he said with a laugh. “You look like an orange on a toothpick.”

Before he was hurt, Lombardi used to take two or three weeks off after the season, and even then he sounded like a man who had too much to drink whenever he let it go any longer than that. “Every time I’d say, ‘Never again.’ It was so brutal to get back in shape.” When his symptoms finally cleared, the hangover was worse than ever.

And when Nashville dumped his US$3.5-million salary on Toronto along with Cody Franson, nobody expected him to be ready for the opener. When Lombardi was cleared and started practising, he felt like he was playing with a square puck. A former 20-goal scorer, and a 53-point guy, he was placed on the fourth line, with lunchpail guys Jay Rosehill and Mike Brown.

“It’s getting there,” he would say of his feel for the stick. “It’s going to keep coming back.”

And then he skated after a puck sitting there like a gift, and it felt round enough to put in the right place. And at the end of this sloppy and shapeless game, in which the Leafs started off looking like scrambled eggs and the Canadiens spent the rest of the night looking lost, Lombardi’s goal stood up as the winner. He was going to be back no matter how this game went; the goal was just a nice play, a sort of confirmation.

“I’ve been sitting on the outside looking in for a long time, and it’s nice to be a part of that, to feel like part of a team,” Lombardi said.

It’s a shame that this season will be so dominated by talk of concussions, of how to hit, of consequences. It really is. But on a night where Matthew Lombardi got back inside the glass, all the noise felt like an echo, hollow and old. Long road to get here, and a long road to go.

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